Friction among friendsĭuring the war, males within an area of the park known as Kasekela teamed up to raid neighboring territories, brutally beating and killing half a dozen former comrades.
The exact nature and cause of the split leading to what Goodall called the “Four-Year War” at Gombe from 1974 to 1978 has long been a mystery, says first author Joseph Feldblum, postdoctoral associate with professor Anne Pusey.
How did a once-unified community of chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, end up at each other’s throats? Tensions that divided these top males also divided their community, researchers found. Now, scientists have been able to take a closer look at the seeds of the conflict thanks to newly digitized field notes in the Jane Goodall Institute Research Center at Duke University. What started as infighting among a few top males vying for status and mates is likely what eventually caused the whole group to splinter. What followed was a period of killings and land grabs, the only civil war ever observed in wild chimpanzees. In the early 1970s, primatologist Jane Goodall and colleagues studying chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, watched as a once-unified chimp community disintegrated into two rival factions. The same things that fuel deadly clashes in humans can also tear apart chimpanzees, our closest animal relatives, according to a new study.
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